On the eve of the twenty-ninth of November a big snow fell, and on our Independence Day the temperature fell to minus twenty. The hare’s been looking for his mom tonight, my mom declared, today’s the day for rum pot, my grandma concluded; my heart beat like crazy. I could smell the rum before Mom had even opened the pot. There’s no greater surprise than a first time, this I know well, because everything that has ever happened to me for the first time was great, and luckily the world was still full of first times and you just had to be a little patient and another first time would roll around. Flags had frozen on the flagpoles outside, the red of the Party and the red of the republic, between them the state tricolor. All was quiet, icy, and calm, not a breath of wind, and the flags, well they hung there as if made of steel or like someone had frozen them at the height of their flapping so they had to wait along with me, eyes wide open, nostrils flared, and fists clenched for the rum pot to be set on the table, in midwinter, on this coldest of all days, which also happens to be our Independence Day, the fruit of last summer, the fruit of boiling-hot days when everything burst with life, now preserved in rum, in that terrifying alcohol, so that another first time would come to pass.
I got one fig, two cherries, a slice of apple, and three strawberries. That’s too much for you, said Grandma, you’re not going to get drunk on us, said Mom, but I looked at the fruit in my bowl, a little disappointed. The fruit had lost all its color: the figs and strawberries were brown, the cherries black, the apples almost gray. Instead of fruit, what I saw looked like the corpses of fruit; dead fruits that hadn’t been eaten when it was their time, fruits that didn’t continue life in our tummies and veins, in hearts remembering them and palates tasting their sweetness. Someone had left them to die, to see in Independence Day dead and soaked in rum.
I held the end of the table with my fingers and stared at the bowl. I didn’t know what to do, from which side or fruit to start. What’s wrong?. . They look like eyes to me. . What kind of eyes?. . Like the eyes in formalin at the medical faculty. Mom shot Grandma an angry look: See what Dobro’s done. . Oh Jesus Christ, said Grandma. I’m telling you, he’s got a screw loose. . What can I do about it?. . You let him take him there. . What could I do, ban him? I’m not his mother and his father.
So you see, there were problems before I’d even tried the rum pot for the first time, and it was all Dad’s fault because he’d taken me to see the organs in formalin. He thought I should see that stuff and there was absolutely no reason why kids shouldn’t see parts of former people, and maybe he thought I’d get interested in medicine and follow, as Auntie Doležal liked to say, in his footsteps. Instead, everything dead and fake started to remind me of organs in formalin, from my cousin Regina’s plastic dolls, which looked like spleen in formalin, to pickled paprikas filled with cabbage, which in see-through jars looked like brain tumors in formalin, to fruit from the rum pot, which looked like eyes in formalin. I didn’t get what the problem was and why something wasn’t allowed to remind me of something in formalin, but it was obvious that asking was out of the question, that I was just supposed to smile and act dumber than I really am.
Grandma grabbed my bowl and scraped the fruit back into the pot. It doesn’t remind me, it doesn’t remind me! I howled, but it was already too late. You’re not getting drunk on me, said Grandma. Go do some math, said Mom. I lost it and started braying. Afterward I always tell myself that I’m not allowed to do this, but it’s no good, I start bawling at the critical moment, I just squawk louder and louder, and my nerves go floppy like slithery noodles in beef soup and it’s blindingly obvious I’m not going to achieve anything because they don’t care about my tears, it’s like I’m a fascist in a Partisan film, but what other option do I have when they do this sort of stuff to me, especially on our Independence Day when we’re supposed to love each other more than on other days because it’s a public holiday and everything is supposed to be flashy like it is on TV.
I kept the squawking up for hours, but they didn’t want to listen, they just quietly went about their business. I stopped when Mom started doing the vacuuming. The insult was bad enough as it was, and the vacuum cleaner sounded like it was mocking me, almost perfectly imitating my voice. Anyone would have thought the vacuum cleaner and I were performing a traditional song from the Far East, from the Siberian wastes or the Mongolian desert or somewhere.
I shut up and went on an anger strike. I didn’t look at them the whole day, answering questions briskly and coldly and only those of an official character, for example, how many classes we had at school tomorrow and whether my PE gear needed washing, Mom said little bastard, look at him sulking, and I sucked that insult up too. She tried being all cuddly before I went to sleep, but I pulled the duvet over my head in a huff and waited for her to leave.
I was angry the next day too. After lunch Grandma asked would you like some rum pot? And I could hardly wait to tell her no, it’s disgusting!. . Excuse me, how is it disgusting?. . It’s not food, it’s al-co-hol — al-co-hol. I’m not a boozer and I don’t need al-co-hol. I broke it up into syllables and looked her straight in the eye. She can’t do anything to me because whatever she wants to say, the Old Devil is going to dance before her eyes, my great-grandpa Blacksmith Joža the Slovenian is going to wake from his grave, my great ally for the day.
Fine, you don’t have to have any, more for us. I snortled out my nose and tried to smile cynically. I practice that smile all the time, for situations when I don’t know what to say or need to shut my mouth so I don’t get it on the snout, but I always get the impression that I don’t do it that well, that to them it looks like I’m going to burst out crying instead of into a smile.
I didn’t try the rum pot that year. I refused it even when I’d quit being angry, even when guests came, even when Nano was here for New Year’s and said c’mon, try a little of mine. I couldn’t break now, even though I wanted to try that dead fruit and the alcohol in it and find out why the fruit died and what my great-grandpa had enjoyed his whole life and what Grandma, Mom, and Grandpa were so desperately afraid of.
Grandma made the rum pot the next year too, she spread her arms, said all done, the whole routine repeated right down to the grapes, the last fruit to go in, and the first icy days of fall when the pot was opened. Grandma said try this fig, for my sake. It was then I gave in because it was a fig and figs are a special fruit for my grandma. Everything to do with figs was tender, quiet, and distant, buried in some long-lost time, and if she went back to that time, she’d become unsteady and unsure of herself, a little girl, my grandma the little girl, because for her all the figs in the world were from Dubrovnik, from the Dubrovnik where she grew up going to an Italian school and looking out to sea from Boninovo. The sea was without end, and life itself had no end, and so at the ends of life and the sea, the only thing in which she was still a child was those figs, in the most beautiful of them all, the violet Ficus indiana, the fruit in which my grandma lives without a single disappointment in life, without a single great pain of adulthood where things stop being childlike and nothing ever happens for the first time. Grandma bore children and buried the first of them, Grandma loved Greta Garbo, her silence and her blue eyes, Grandma delivered grandchildren and buried the first of them, Grandma loved Grandpa and buried him too, Grandma hated the Old Devil because the Old Devil had brought Grandpa only suffering in life and Grandma couldn’t allow it that someone she loved suffered. This is what I was thinking when she said try this fig, for my sake, or that’s what I thought much later when I was growing up fast and more and more things were for the last time and fewer and fewer for the first time. That fig is lodged in my brain from a different time and it belongs only to her and it will stay that way forever.